Tag: Personal Challenges

Starting this June, I took advantage of an opportunity of a lifetime to travel. When this opportunity landed on my lap, my first reaction had been hesitance until a friend had said, “Are you crazy? Do you know how few people in the world can do this?”

“But my career,” I had replied, “A year off would slow that momentum down, and it feels so self-indulgent.” In the end, opportunity won, and I gave notice to my job where I had a close group friends and community, a sense of purpose and an independent pay-check*. This would be the first time I was without a job since age 16.** Continue reading “Lessons on the Road: Balance in the Extremes”

Every person has a coming-of-age story. If you’re lucky, yours would not be very exciting. While I wish I could say that I reached adulthood when I moved into my dormitory in college or the moment I graduated and picked up suits from the mall like a grown woman to head to my first job in New York City, I’m afraid I – like the rest of the Ding/Fan family household – appeared to be a late bloomer.

Childhood and young adulthood is filled with emotions that rise and drop like waves, unfettered idealism, and an enormous confidence in one’s untested convictions. Perhaps that is why the young will always be more creative, brash and exciting than their older peers, and because of this, I look back on some misguided events in my younger days with a mix of embarrassment, pride and at the end of the day, a shrug, “Oh to be young.” Continue reading “London and the Coming of Age”